2007–2008 Africana Studies Courses
Courses in Related Disciplines
African Art: Images of Transformation
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
In this seminar, we will examine in depth the art of a number of African societies and focus on art that is used in rites of passage to mark transitions from one status or condition to another. We will examine art objects used in initiation rites that celebrate one’s movement from childhood to adult. We will look at how an ordinary person becomes (and remains) a sacred king. Finally we will analyze the performance of weddings and funerals to see how they make use of space and architecture. In these ways, we will try to gain a sense of the complex cultural meanings, the ambiguity and expressive power, and the dynamic transformation of past and present African art.
Borders, Boundaries, and Belonging
Level: Open
Semester: Year
International boundaries are often taken to be fixed and unchanging demarcations of nation-states and the quintessential expression of national sovereignty. This course examines how physical and social boundaries are made and policed through immigration controls. We begin by studying theories of international migration in order to understand how globalization has accelerated the flows of money and people around the world. Why do people migrate? How do economic, political, cultural, and social transnational linkages shape international migration? What are forced and voluntary migrations? Next we turn to the historical development of border controls in the early twentieth-century period of nation-state formation through the post 9/11 period. Why do we use passports? How are borders policed? How do techniques and practices such as classification, apprehension, detention, and deportation factor into the migration process? What is the role of border agents, human smugglers, NGOs, and private citizens in regulating the movement of people across international borders? Finally, we will investigate the construction of social boundaries and the process of citizenship making. How do everyday practices of boundary policing generate distinctions between licit and illicit flows and differences between citizens and noncitizens? How are immigrants and their children transforming traditional understandings of membership and belonging? We will ground our inquiry in texts analyzing immigration controls in the receiving countries from select regions in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Collective Violence and Political Change
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
Is violence and violent struggle a part of ordinary politics? The answer to this question has a profound impact on the way we view protest activity and the actions of states; it affects the way we understand struggles for greater rights, struggles for power, and the resolution of those struggles. This course challenges the assumption that violence is simply the end of politics by investigating the uses of violence as an integral part of political processes from the repression of demonstrations to war and terrorism. We investigate central questions concerning the role of violence and its short-term impact on politics. What leads states to choose war or organizations to choose violent means to press their demands? Are certain regimes more likely to engage in violence than others, or do different regimes simply employ different forms of violence? Under what conditions will nonviolent movement tactics be most effective? Under what conditions do actors tend to move toward violence? Should countries such as the United States support struggles for democracy if they seem destined to lead to greater violence in the short term? How can violence be measured? Are states losing their relative monopoly on violence? These questions are central not only to important theoretical and philosophical debates, but in the current political climate, they are increasingly central to pressing policy discussions and crucial political and humanitarian choices. How we as individuals and the United States as a state view violence and how we respond to it can have dramatic consequences for international relations, for states, and for their citizens around the world.
Prior relevant course work required.
Concepts of International Law and Human Rights: Their History and Contemporary Practice
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Global human rights are rife with apparent contradictions. Should governments ignore fundamental freedoms and detain without trial individuals who might otherwise succeed in executing terrorist attacks? Why did the U.S. government help its corporations overseas guard their HIV medicine patents while threatening to breach its own patent for ciprofloxacin, a drug that treats anthrax? Why are some territories, but not others, permitted to secede from their predecessor state and achieve statehood? The first half of the course analyzes such apparent contradictions under different theories of human rights and international law as they have evolved over the previous several hundred years. The course will discuss the universalist, relativist, and central case approaches to human rights alongside the positivist and policy-oriented approaches to international law. By applying human rights and international law theories to global decision-making processes involving governments, nongovernmental organizations, the media, and other actors, the course offers varying explanations of global human rights as they currently exist. In the second half of the course, students will apply various human rights theories to different contemporary human rights problems, such as the right to self-determination under different models of national government; human rights and national security in the context of terrorism; socioeconomic rights of developing countries versus the rights of foreign corporations to the protection of investments; the right to medicines versus the patent rights of pharmaceuticals; gay and lesbian rights; women’s rights; freedom to practice religions that may be antithetical to other human rights; and freedom of movement across nations versus national rights to protect citizens and citizenship. If there is sufficient interest among seminar participants, students may each draft sections of a larger law review article on a pressing human rights issue.
Diagramming Ethnicity: Theories, Methods, and Texts of Ethnic Studies
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
In what contexts does ethnicity emerge as a new way of thinking through and responding to political challenges? How was ethnicity imagined as a form of power during decolonization movements in the third world and anti-racism movements in the U.S.? How was ethnicity re-envisioned as ethnic nationalisms in anti-colonial liberation movements and the U.S. civil rights movement? How has ethnicity been linked to linguistic minority in relation to different types of nationalisms and to immigration? How has ethnicity become fragmented into multiple, individual “identities” during the growth of niche markets globally? We will try to figure out what ethnicity is by focusing on how it has been used and what it has produced. We will also investigate some of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of ethnicity that get at issues of power, identification, subjectivity, freedom, agency, and language. These theoretical discussions will enable us to rethink a number of disciplinary holds on the ethnic, specifically certain state-invested forms of anthropology, area studies, and sociology; as well as to explore uses of the ethnic that have helped to produce interdisciplinary and critical methodologies, i.e., cultural studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, globalization studies, and critical ethnographies. These analyses of discourse will be threaded through a diverse selection of literary texts, which open up flashpoints on the twentieth century. Literary authors will include Richard Wright, Jose Rizal, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Li-Young Lee, Wendy Law-Yone, Trinh Minh-ha, Le Ly Hayslip, Assia Djebar, and Arundhati Roy. Critical perspectives will be culled from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Rey Chow, Naoki Sakai, Ngugu wa Thiong’o, Ella Shohat, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others.
First-Year Studies: Africa in the International System
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
Far too often, investigations of the politics, economics, and societies of sub-Saharan Africa present African states and their populations in isolation from the international system. This course investigates the politics of African states and their populations as part of world politics from colonialism to formal democracy to explore the myriad connections between advanced industrial states such as the United States and geographically distant and economically less-developed African states. We engage in a rigorous examination of the politics and economics of colonial and postcolonial rule and then move to focus on the genesis and impact of recent economic and political transitions. Key questions include: How are postcolonial African states distinctive from other postcolonial states? In what ways are postcolonial states linked to their former colonizers? How do ethnicity, class, and gender identities play into contemporary politics? What role have Western states played in the presence or absence of democracy in African states? How do the politics of patronage affect processes of political and economic change, such as democratization and the implementation of structural adjustment programs? What impact have international financial institutions played in aggravating or alleviating conditions of poverty? What choices and tradeoffs do Africa’s postcolonial leaders and citizens face, and what role do African states and their citizens play in the international community? This course will not investigate the experiences of all African countries but will address these questions by drawing on the experiences of a number of states including Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. We will draw on a variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of contemporary African politics as they are embedded in and affect international politics.
First-Year Studies: Islam
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to the foundational texts of Islam, the historical development of different Muslim cultures, and the contemporary issues that animate Islam’s ever-evolving manifestations. We will begin with the Qur’an, a book whose juxtaposition of narrative fragments, apocalyptic imagery, divine voice, and sociopolitical themes conveyed in rhymed Arabic prose has both entranced and confounded readers. We will look at the historical roots of the “isms” used today to describe the orientations of Sunnism, Shi‘ism, Sufism, and Salafism. Looking beyond the Middle East, where only about 20 percent of the current global population of Muslims reside, we will examine how migrating people, concepts, texts, and practices have transformed and have been transformed by existing traditions in different geographical locations. Contemporary preoccupations such as the status of women in Islam and the relationship between Islam and violence will be examined from a variety of perspectives illustrating the intricacies of Muslim and non-Muslim acts of interpretation and their relationship to power and authority.
From Mammies to Matriarchs: The Image of the African American Woman in Film, from Birth of a Nation to Current Cinema
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
The representation of African American women in American film will be examined historically and with reference to the relationship between existing feminist theory, representation, black feminist thought, as well as within the political and social context of race and class. The course will also challenge the viewer to critically examine the existing nature of media, imagery, and entertainment in relation to the sexual, racial, and class oppression of African American women. There will also be a required group production component.
Gender and Development: Politics, Violence, and Livelihoods in South Asian and African Societies
Semester: Spring
In this seminar, we will examine and discuss key issues of gender and development as they are relevant for rural and urban communities in African and South Asian countries. To what extent are gender politics used to include or exclude community members in the development process? How are gender associations used symbolically, and in what ways are these associations detrimental to gender equality? What limitations do community members face due to gender bias as they develop their livelihoods? To what extent is gender-based violence “learned” in schools and other institutional settings? What work is being done to improve gender equality in the development process? In Africa and South Asia, the geographical foci of the course, we will explore how gender has played a significant role in development, politics, violence, and livelihood strategies. We will begin with an overview of general themes and topics of gender and development, discussing issues of identity, misconception, and prejudice. We will discuss how the body is used metaphorically by societies and how this affects the roles of all individuals in various cultural contexts. We will explore specific case studies of gender politics, livelihoods, and violence in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, South Africa, the Gambia, and other African and South Asian countries. Complicated and sensitive issues such as HIV/AIDS, cultural initiation rights, and sexual violence will be discussed. This seminar will conclude with a hopeful look forward with an examination of work being conducted toward gender equality and analysis of projects using gendered approaches to the peace process. Weekly films, mass media, books, and selected readings will be used to inform debate and discussion. A structured conference project will integrate closely with one of the diverse topics of the seminar.
Sophomore and above. Some experience in the social sciences desired but not required.
Gender and Power in the “Muslim” World
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
When gender in the Muslim world is the object of our scrutiny, invariably the emphasis is on women’s subordination to men. “Gender” then is frequently used interchangeably with “women” rather than with both sexes; and both (Muslim) men and women tend to be located outside history, in some eternal state of being. Colonial authors, mass media analysts, regimes and political parties of the left and right (within the Muslim world and external to it), and many feminists all contribute to this rather limited vision. We will start with an analysis of the various reasons for existing biases with regard to thinking about gender in the “Muslim” world, whereby gender is “naturalized” rather than historicized. We will look at the semiotics of gender historically and in the contemporary moment, and, by examining its implications for notions of “Muslim” men and women, masculinity and femininity, we will strive to arrive at a different sensibility and methodology regarding the realities of gender and power. Contrary to conventional approaches, we will deploy historical, comparative, and social constructivist approaches to understanding the phenomena under study. In other words, rather than adopting an essentialist approach to relations of gender and power, we will attempt to situate these practices in context. The intent is to see how power is deployed in the very manner in which gender in the Middle East is represented. We will turn from an examination of the semiotics of gender to the historical processes through which the current engendering of social relations and hierarchies between the sexes has been reproduced, challenged, transgressed, and transformed. In the process, we will attempt to generate a more complex and nuanced understanding, one that is attentive to ambiguities and contradictions. Given the limitations of existing literature on the topic, our analysis is not intended to be a comprehensive accounting of gendered lives and struggles in the geographical spaces under study. Instead, we will attempt to address a number of questions such as, What are the different conceptual frameworks that inform our perceptions of gender in North Africa and West Asia? What politics and histories are embedded in different “ways of seeing”? What are the various discursive and material forces that inform men’s and women’s lives in the places under scrutiny, and how do they serve to privilege men over women? How does class play into the social relations between the sexes? What constitutes the “good” man and/or woman at different historical periods? How do different institutions of state and civil society provide openings for resistance to the status quo? How do colonial moments and those of war change the dynamics regarding gender and power? What new forms of knowledge are being produced that challenge and contest existing ideas and realities on the ground? Our exploration of these questions will be framed by different theoretical concerns such as those of feminist and postcolonial thought and those of political economy. We will draw on scholarly, literary, and visual materials. Students will be encouraged to undertake theoretical research on the topic that relies on primary sources.
Global Africa: Theories and Cultures of Diaspora
Level: Advanced
Semester: Spring
Changes in migration patterns, immigration laws, and refugee policies have meant that Africans are living and working in unexpected places. Studies of the African diaspora used to focus on the dispersion of Africans as a result of the trans-Saharan, transatlantic, and Indian Ocean slave trades. More recent scholarship has focused on new African diasporas: Senegambians in Harlem and Rome, Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in Japan. These modern-day dispersals, powered in part by the forces of globalization, demand new levels of analysis by scholars. How have people of African descent ended up settling in places far from their natal homes? How has the concept of an African homeland contributed to the articulation of religious and political movements (Ethiopianism, black power, Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism) in the diaspora? How have theories about other diasporas (South Asian, Jewish, Chinese, etc.) informed scholarship on the African diaspora? This course will study these new African migrations, as well as revisit the histories of older settlement patterns. Students who have taken courses in Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Global Studies, Latin American Studies, or International Relations are particularly encouraged to apply.
Global Geographies: From Colonization to the World Bank
Level: Open
Semester: Year
In this yearlong seminar, we will discuss and analyze competing paradigms and approaches to the concepts of “development” and the “third world.” We will begin by examining how the world functioned 500 years ago, in order to understand how the forms of development since then have impacted the way we live and think. This first part of the course will acquaint us with (and allow an analysis of) the historical origins and evolution of an international political economy of which the third world is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial development to understand the evolving meaning of this term. In particular we will examine the Congo, South Africa, and India. These case studies will help us assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, we will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by third world nation-states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies. We will analyze the work of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO through a variety of readings. Throughout the course, our investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the course—the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project beginning in the fall semester and completed in the spring. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions. Where possible, students will be encouraged to do primary research over the winter and spring breaks.
Global Value Chains: The Geographies of Our Daily Needs
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
In this seminar, we will examine and discuss key issues of globalization, consumerism, environmental justice, and global value chains. From day-to-day, we all use various commodities, such as coffee, fresh fruits and vegetables, chocolate, and gasoline. Perhaps we think about where these items on our daily shopping lists are made, but most often we do not. What are the global realities involved in the production and trade of the items we buy each day? How do the producers and traders along the value chain benefit from our consumerism? What are the social, political, and environmental costs? To what extent is the place of origin used, hidden, masked, manipulated, or marketed to sell an item? What roles do consumers play in global commodity chains? How are our preferences catered to through the strategies of marketing geographies of commodities? In this course, we will explore how global value chains shape the livelihoods of urban and rural communities across the globe. We will begin with an overview of general themes and topics of globalization, consumerism, environmental justice, and global value chains. We will discuss how the demands of one region of the world can guide the political economy of another. Through a careful analysis of relevant case studies, we will explore the costs and benefits of free trade and economic liberalization. We will also study the fair trade movement and the complex opportunities this movement has presented to global producers. This seminar will conclude with a hopeful look forward with an examination of work being conducted toward more equitable involvement of the world’s producers in the global economy. Weekly films, mass media, books, and selected readings will be used to inform debate and discussion. A structured conference project will integrate closely with one of the diverse topics of the seminar.
Harvest! Land, Labor, and Natural Resources in Latin American History
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
This seminar looks at how natural environments and systems of labor and capital have intersected at different periods in the history of Latin America. How have humans transformed, tamed, devastated—and sometimes been devastated by—their material surroundings in the quest for sustenance, shelter, and eventually profit, “progress,” and power? We will start with Jared Diamond’s materialist, “long-view” explanation of global inequality in Guns, Germs, and Steel; take a critical look at the idea of indigenous Americans’ spiritual oneness with the earth; and proceed through a series of case studies and theoretical essays covering peasant production, plantation slavery, forest product exploitation, export agriculture, and corporate mining and logging. We will use the vehicle of agrarian/environmental history to examine some of the most important themes in Latin American history—violence, slavery, migrations, race, imperialism, gender, human rights, trade, labor, revolution.
Open to sophomores and above.
Image-Affect-Ethnic: How to Make Bodies Move
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
If I am a person in Korea, a Korean in Asia, an Asian in the world, and an Asian American in the U.S., then what is it that I am? Must this description of movement also serve as an explanation of an identity crisis? A key challenge in ethnic and cultural studies today comes from a political impasse and critical exhaustion in confronting the ethnic subject’s identity crises, psychic ills, and traumas. This course will take an uncharted (though well-traveled) route through the notion of “affectivity”—understood as the capacity for bodily movement in the fullest sense of the phrase—in order to arrive at a new way of viewing and engaging crisis. We will attempt to rethink the “ethnic” through four rhetorical tropes: turn, fold, cut, switch. These tropes offer us figural descriptions of how ethnic bodies move and act. Thinking through these moving figures gets us away from the spectacle of the ethnicized body (marked by race, class, gender, and sexuality) and encourages us to explore the creative energy of crisis itself. How does one turn into oneself and then again into some other self? How do exterior pressures cause one to fold in on oneself, producing double selves? How does one make cuts in one’s world, dividing oneself up into fragments of a self? How does one switch between different loyalties and affiliations? Given the mobility of these tropes’ ability to represent the ethnic, we will consider a selection of literary and visual texts that directly engage the movements of travel—from the return journey home to the wanderings of the not-so-casual tourist. Rather than focus our discussion on examples from a single, clearly demarcated time and space, we will instead take up the ambiguous ethnic designation of “transnational Asian” as a more appropriate case study in our musings on ethnicity, bodily movement, and travel. Authors will include Pamela Lu, David Mura, Andrew Pham, Lawrence Chua, Dai Sijie, Zhang Yimou, and Wong Kar-Wai. Critical discussions of affect will consider Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, among others.
Muslim Literature, Film, and Art
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
In current global circumstances, Islam is all too frequently represented solely in terms of political and militant ideologies. For those who wish to dig deeper, there are the rich and varied traditions of classical religious scholarship and jurisprudence. But to look at Islam through these lenses alone is to miss alternate sensibilities that are just as important in providing the material from which many Muslims construct their identities. In this course, we will be studying some of the distinctive themes and aesthetic traditions associated with Muslim cultures. When the contemporary Syrian poet Adonis speaks of a “Sufi aesthetic,” what does he mean by this? What is the dynamic underlying the text/image art movement named hurufiyya after the medieval Islamic study of the occult properties of letters? In what ways do the religious elements of controversial novels like Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and Naguib Mafouz’s Children of the Alley engage with long-standing traditions of storytelling? How is a theme like the veil addressed in works that take into account Western responses as much as other symbolic histories? How is a medium like film used to portray the role of religion in motivating or responding to acts of violence? Although most of the material we will be studying will be from the contemporary period, premodern works will be used to illustrate the ways in which Muslim artistic and literary works have historically adapted themes, genre, and media from pre-Islamic and other cultures.
A previous course in Islam, the Qur’an, or Sufism is required.
Poetry Workshop: The New Black Aesthetic
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.” What is “black poetry”? Is there such a thing and what, then, are the black tools of writing? Recently Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Native Guard, and Nathaniel Mackey won the National Book Award for Splay Anthem. What can we learn from the current width of black literary expression? Is it mostly black experience in literary whiteface or a tool for social change in the spirit of the Black Arts Movement with its own identifiable tradition and aesthetic practice(s)? What are its holy rules, cultural taboos, and bold moves? This is a workshop course, a poem a week, set against the backdrop of reading black poetry. Students will be asked to imitate and view the craft of writing poetry from an often oppositional cultural stance, one that (perhaps) agrees and disagrees with their own sense of reality and creative perceptions. Class participation is a must, and there will be visitors, readings, a judicious workshop setting, and a required final portfolio.
Poverty and Public Policy: An Ecological and Psychobiological Approach
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
One-fifth of all American children live in poverty. Why? And what can be done about it? In this course, we will take an ecological and psychobiological approach to poverty in America and its relationship to public policy, with a focus on child poverty. We will discuss how physical and psychosocial environments differ for poor and non-poor children and their families in both rural and urban contexts, specifically rural upstate New York and urban New York City. We will explore how these differences affect mental and physical health and motor, cognitive, language, and socioemotional development. We will also discuss individual and environmental protective factors that buffer some children from the adverse affects of poverty, as well as the impacts of public policy on poor children and their families, including the recent welfare reform in the United States. Topics will include environmental chaos, cumulative risk and its relationship to chronic stress, and unequal access to health care services. This course has a service learning component. Students will be expected to participate in a community partnership addressing issues related to poverty as part of their conference work.
A previous course in the social sciences or permission of the instructor is required.
Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past, which its protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War re-enactors who dedicate their weekends to remembering this war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester).
Race in a Global Context
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course is a comparative inquiry into the mechanisms of racial domination. First, we will review major theoretical approaches to the study of race. What is the difference between race and ethnicity? How have concepts of race changed over time? Are we seeing a return to biological frameworks of race through advancements in genetic technologies? Next, we will analyze the making and unmaking of race and systems of racial classification that divide and rank social groups. How is race (un)made? What forms of racial categorization can be found across different societies? Finally, we will examine various systems of racial classification across space and time in order to investigate how these are inscribed and reproduced through institutional forms of racial division and domination—namely, prejudice, discrimination, segregation, ghettoization, and exclusionary violence. What is the difference between prejudice and discrimination? Is segregation the same as ghettoization? What determines which groups will be segregated, ghettoized, expelled, or exterminated? By the end of the course, students will have learned to critically interrogate the commonly used concept of “racism” and acquired more useful analytical tools for understanding race as a major organizing principle in social life in the United States through a comparison with other international contexts. Readings will be based on sociological, anthropological, and historical studies of race relations in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe.
Rainbow Nation: Growing Up South African in the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Eras
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.”
—Nelson Mandela (1994), Long Walk to Freedom
In this course, we will discuss what it was like to grow up South African in different contexts during the apartheid era, and what it is like to grow up South African today, during the post-apartheid era. We will consider how people from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds have dealt, and are still dealing, with the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era. Part of this discussion will involve identity formation for South African children and adolescents. We will also discuss how children’s cognitive, language, social, and emotional development, as well as their mental and physical health, are influenced by the environment in which they live, which during apartheid was determined by the governmental classification of race. We will also discuss South African psychological research during and after apartheid and its relationship to public policy. How did researchers’ political affiliations, race, and culture affect the questions they asked, the measures they used, the ways in which they interpreted their data, and even whether and where they published their research findings? Readings will be drawn from psychological research, memoirs and other firsthand accounts (including Nelson Mandela’s autobiography), and literature. We will also view and analyze several classic and contemporary films, including The Power of One, Tsotsi, Catch a Fire, and Cry, the Beloved Country.
Sisters in Struggle: Women and U.S. Social Movements in the Twentieth Century
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
From kitchen tables to assembly lines, from legislative podiums to sidewalk soapboxes, women have demanded dignity and respect for themselves, their families, and their communities. This course traces the history of such mobilizations in the twentieth-century United States, focusing especially on moments that can illuminate the gender dynamics of epic contests over class, race, and empire. We will explore the many varieties of women’s work for labor and civil rights movements; the multiple ways in which women have constructed activist identities; competing definitions of women’s liberation, women’s issues, and women’s rights; and their activism’s impacts on personal relationships and family life as well as national and international politics. Readings and materials include oral history, fiction, film, and autobiography, in addition to historical scholarship.
Open to graduate students, seniors, and qualified juniors.
The Caribbean and the Atlantic World
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
The Caribbean is Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico—and it is also Venezuela, eighteenth-century New Orleans, the coastal areas of Central America settled by runaway shipwrecked slaves, and south Florida. The Caribbean speaks Spanish, English, Creole, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Papamiento, and Miskitu, It is an area of tremendous diversity but linked by common experiences of African slavery, colonial domination, underdevelopment, nationalism, and revolution. This course examines the history and culture of the Caribbean, from 1492 to the present, with special emphasis on its place in the world: a source of unprecedented wealth built by the labor of enslaved Africans; a hot spot of international competition, piracy, and war; a crossroads of goods, ideas, and people; and in the twentieth century, a region struggling to be more than an "American lake." We will pay particular attention to Haiti and Cuba, whose democratic and socialist revolutions had an impact in the Americas as powerful as the other, better-known "great revolutions" of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In our study of the ways in which the Caribbean has been connected to other parts of the Atlantic World, we will use monographs that represent a variety of different historical methodologies and emphases (social, economic, cultural, Atlantic, environmental, and gender history), as well as primary sources.
Open to sophomores and above.
The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
Since the early 1980’s, laissez-faire has become the conventional wisdom. Mainstream economists explain the socioeconomic marginalization of large sections of the world’s population by claiming that poor countries have failed to implement “appropriate” policies. These “appropriate” policies include free trade, free capital mobility, labor market flexibility, and a reduced role for the state with regard to industrial and social policies. In recent years the neoliberal socioeconomic vision has been challenged politically and intellectually, as is readily seen by the large-scale rejection of such policies across much of Latin America. This course will introduce students to the current debates regarding global laissez-faire. Our focus will be on the forces that shape global inequalities. It will be argued that ultimately proposals regarding more or less state intervention need to be grounded in an understanding of the process of market competition itself and the behavior of capitalist firms. Thus a crucial feature of the course will be a theoretical and empirical investigation of what one might call the microeconomic foundations of state policies. Some of the questions we will pose are as follows: What are the historical roots of international uneven development? Should there be more or less government involvement in lowering international inequalities and domestic poverty? Should the state in developing countries be involved in the process of industrialization, or should this be left to the free market? Under what conditions would private firms reject or accept state intervention? What was the historical experience of the developed countries with regard to the role of the state and industrialization? What are the social consequences of globalization? After dealing with core theoretical controversies in economic theory, this yearlong lecture will introduce students to the concrete development experiences of several countries in both the developing and developed worlds.
The Psychology of Race and Ethnicity
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Fall
What is race? Is it “real”? What does such a question mean in face of four hundred years of American history and a continuing legacy of racial discrimination and prejudice? Race as a “scientific” biological concept holds little currency; yet as a political and psychological construct, race holds much power in American society. This lecture explores the effects of the construction of race, ethnicity, and social class on the individual and how these constructs implicitly and explicitly inform psychological inquiry. We will examine the social construction of race and development of racial/ethnic identity in childhood and adolescence, as well as gendered and sexual aspects of race/ethnicity. In the latter half of the course, we will move toward a broader understanding of psychological aspects of prejudice, ethnic conflict, and immigration and how these themes are expressed within the U.S. and abroad.
Urban Poverty and Public Policy in United States
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
Since the United States of America is a rich country and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in 1954, many would like to believe that in the United States poverty and school segregation are issues in America’s distant past. The paradox between American wealth and the nation’s poverty raises a number of questions. What is the extent of inequality in America’s schools? What is the history of America’s poor? What has been the public policy on urban poverty through the years? Have there been any major changes in economic hardship over time? What is the poorhouse and what is its legacy of the poorhouse on our nation’s welfare system? Has there always been a housing crisis in Manhattan? What was the nature of the urban crisis in the aftermath of the Second World War? And what did the Great Society and the war on poverty do to solve it? This seminar explores the dynamics of capitalism in cities with merchant, industrial, and postindustrial economies; it investigates the nature of immigration, class formation, social reformers and political bosses, ethnic and race relations, slums and ghettos, work and residence, opportunity structures and social mobility, corporate investment strategies and federal urban renewal policies, as well as poverty and welfare. Students will pay special attention to the relationship of ideas and institutions in the rise of schools, prisons, and asylums in urban America. What is the meaning of blackness and whiteness in the United States? And why does that matter? Finally, what is the impact of the economic degradation of poor people on American citizenship in general? What is the price of citizenship in the era of globalization?
Visions/Revisions: Issues in U.S. Women’s History
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of U.S. women’s history and related subjects, including women’s lives beyond the United States. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960’s, from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions will range from fundamental questions—What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?—to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history to clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. M.A. candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
A graduate course open to qualified seniors and graduate students.
Women in the Black Revolt: The Lecture
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Fall
This lecture course explores several historical dimensions of women’s leadership in the black freedom struggle in the United States. Women like Mary Prince and Linda Brent fought American slavery on a number of fronts, resisting their exploitation in production and reproduction, defining the meaning of kinship, creating sisterhood and community, fashioning spiritual movements, and writing narratives as the liberating act of self-definition. Forging their freedom, washer women like Callie House fought for the right to have some pleasure in life; they also led labor battles, initiated general strikes, and mobilized mass movements for reparations. Women like Ida B. Wells led anti-lynching crusades and those like Amy Jacques Garvey sustained Pan-African political movements. Intellectuals like Anna Julia Cooper criticized male chauvinism and challenged patriarchy. Sisters like Vicki Garvin created radical theories and those like Gloria Richardson and Diane Nash mapped strategies for liberation. Sarah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam and Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party. Women like Ella Baker and Septima Clark pioneered the organizing tradition in the Black Revolt, and sisters like Johnnie Tillmon and Ruby Duncan served as the vanguard of the welfare rights movement. Thus, this course examines the lives of a number of those leaders, writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Mary Bethune, Elizabeth Catlett, Anne Moody, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.
Women in the Black Revolt: The Seminar
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This seminar explores several historical dimensions of women’s leadership in the black freedom struggle in the United States. Women like Mary Prince and Linda Brent fought American slavery on a number of fronts, resisting their exploit-ation in production and reproduction, defining the meaning of kinship, creating sisterhood and community, fashioning spiritual movements, and writing narratives as the liberating act of self-definition. Forging their freedom, washer women like Callie House fought for the right to have some pleasure in life; they also led labor battles, initiated general strikes, and mobilized mass movements for reparations. Women like Ida B. Wells led anti-lynching crusades and those like Amy Jacques Garvey sustained Pan-African political movements. Intellectuals like Anna Julia Cooper criticized male chauvinism and challenged patriarchy. Sisters like Vicki Garvin created radical theories and those like Gloria Richardson and Diane Nash mapped strategies for liberation. Sarah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam and Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party. Women like Ella Baker and Septima Clark pioneered the organizing tradition in the Black Revolt, and sisters like Johnnie Tillmon and Ruby Duncan served as the vanguard of the welfare rights movement. Thus, this course examines the lives of a number of those leaders, writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Mary Bethune, Elizabeth Catlett, Anne Moody, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.
Workers, Law, and Global Justice
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
In this yearlong seminar, we will examine the complex relationship between the law, working people’s struggles, and movements for social change in a global economy, from Yonkers to Oaxaca. At the same time, we will be a central part of building a grassroots coalition supporting immigrant day laborers’ struggles for justice. We will orient ourselves with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of community organizing. We will begin our scholarly work by analyzing U.S. workers’ rights in relation to labor history and political economy and the symbiotic relationship between the development of labor and employment laws and social movements of immigrants, people of color, and working women. We will then examine contemporary phenomena such as contingent work, the outsourcing/offshoring of manufacturing, the rise of service-sector behemoths such as Wal-Mart, the decline and transformation of the labor movement, the use of undocumented immigrants as low-wage workers, and the rise of workers’ centers. This inquiry will provide the raw material for a critical examination of the relationships between changes in the political economy, social movements, and key modern labor and employment laws in the United States. In the spring, we will examine workers’ rights in a climate of global economic integration. We will study contrasting responses by workers in the Americas and the Caribbean to the integration of the global economy under the “neoliberal” philosophy of globalized privatization, deregulation, and “structural adjustment.” We will be introduced to the concepts of economic human rights and international labor rights and to the international institutions responsible for monitoring and enforcing them. We will interrogate the viability of transnational solidarity as a means to build alternatives to the neoliberal model and will critically analyze competing strategies in this struggle. Students will be expected to devote four hours per week (outside class) to a community partnership addressing issues raised by our studies as part of their conference work. While it is my preference that students work with me on the SLC Institute for Policy Alternatives day labor organizing project, students may also arrange to work with other area unions, community groups, or legal organizations doing workers’ rights-oriented advocacy. Spanish proficiency is desirable but not required.